The present invention relates to an electronic musical instrument for reading out musical tone waveform data from a memory and generating a musical sound corresponding to a designated pitch.
In a conventional electronic musical instrument, generally, a musical tone waveform corresponding to one period is permanently stored in advance in a memory. The stored musical tone waveform is read out and a musical tone signal corresponding to the pitch is generated.
In another conventional electronic musical instrument, musical tone data, such as pitch or tone length data, corresponding to a played musical sequence is stored. In this case, a "sequencer" memory is provided in addition to a memory for storing the musical tone data.
In the former electronic musical instrument, the content of the memory is permanently stored, and signal processing is performed with a predetermined hardware configuration. Thus, signal processing lacks flexibility.
In the latter electronic musical instrument, a separate memory is used to store musical tone data, incurring a high cost.